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Arab TV Gets a New Slant: Newscasts Without Censorship

In millions of homes and offices across the Arab world, television sets are regularly tuned these days to Al Jazeera, a hard-hitting Arabic-language news channel that explores issues long suppressed by the region's rulers, including the lack of democracy, the persecution of political dissidents and the repression of women.

From studios in this tiny emirate in the Persian Gulf, Al Jazeera offers round-the-clock programming based on a principle revolutionary by the traditional standards of Middle East broadcasting, that all coverage should be free of censorship or bias. In another innovation for the Arab world, ordinary Arabs can air their views on an array of freewheeling phone-in shows.

The result has been a sensation in the 22 Arab countries where Al Jazeera's broadcasts can be seen. In Algiers's Casbah, in Cairo's slums, in the suburbs of Damascus, even in the desert tents of Bedouins with satellite dishes, the channel has become a way of life. In its 30 months on air, it has drawn viewers in droves from the mind-numbing fare offered by the region's state-run networks, whose news coverage often amounts to little more than a reverential chronicle of government affairs.

Even where Al Jazeera cannot be seen live, in countries like Iraq that ban satellite dishes, videos of its shows are traded eagerly in bazaars. Sometimes, viewer interest has been piqued by scoops like the lengthy interview the channel broadcast three weeks ago with Osama bin Laden, the Islamic militant who has been indicted as the alleged mastermind of the bombings of American embassies in East Africa last year that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

The interview gave Arab audiences their first opportunity to hear Mr. Bin Laden speak uncensored, and in their own language. Ironically, for an enterprise often accused of acting as a mouthpiece for American ideas, Al Jazeera's management faced pressure not to broadcast the interview from American diplomats who expressed fears that Mr. Bin Laden's calls for new attacks could heighten risks for Americans in the Middle East.

The Qatar channel has been watched with growing interest by Middle East scholars, many of whom see it as emblematic of deep stirrings across the Arab world.

Some specialists see its popularity as evidence that Islamic conservatism, long seen as the rising force in the Arab world, faces a challenge from a new generation yearning for societies that are more, not less, tolerant and democratic.

''What Al Jazeera shows is that people across the Arab world want open discussion of the issues that affect their lives, and that new communications technologies make it impossible for governments to stop them,'' said Dale Eickelman, a Dartmouth College professor who recently visited Al Jazeera's studios in Doha. He added: ''The days have gone when Arab governments can control what their people know, and what they think.''

The region's rulers, unable or unwilling to take the drastic steps that would be necessary to deny their people access to the channel, such as confiscating satellite dishes, have struck back in other ways. In Saudi Arabia, Government spokesmen have dubbed it ''the suspicious channel,'' and described its programming as ''poisonous.'' In Algeria, an Al Jazeera program exploring the darker corners of that country's civil war suddenly went off the air when the Government cut electrical power in several major cities.

But among ordinary Arabs, the channel is credited with breathing much-needed fresh air into the stifling climate in which Arabs have traditionally debated political, social and religious issues. Programs have dealt with previously unmentionable topics like the prevalence of torture in Arab jails, the killing and ''disappearing'' of political opponents in countries like Algeria, and even the modern relevance of ancient Islamic codes, such as the right of Muslim men to marry up to four wives.

Little has been glossed over in the channel's readiness to challenge old taboos, even when the subject touches on the most sensitive issue of all, the teachings of the Muslim prophet Mohammed, as embodied in the Koran. Discussion programs have pitted conservative Muslim clerics against reformist scholars, and feminists against traditionalists, in exchanges that have explored the bitter differences over Islamic doctrine with in the Arab world.

Confirming what visitors to Arab palaces already knew -- that the channel is widely watched by the powerful, as well as the powerless -- one phone-in program was called last year by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan ruler, offering his views on Arab nationalism. Other callers, usually from sanctuaries outside their own countries, have condemned leaders like President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, and urged their overthrow.

For some of the Arab world's most powerful leaders, Al Jazeera's feistiness is all the more galling for the fact that it is broadcast from Qatar, a nation of 600,000 people, the smallest in the Arab world. Eighteen months before the first broadcast in November 1996, power passed in a bloodless palace coup from one of the most conservative Arab rulers to his son, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, a graduate of Britain's Sandhurst military academy.

The new Emir of Qatar, who is 47 years old, has proven to be one of the Arab world's most reform-minded leaders. Shortly after taking power, he abolished the country's Information Ministry, and with it a system of censorship that kept tight control on the country's newspapers and broadcasting. A few months later, while pondering the possibility of establishing what some Qataris call ''an Arab CNN,'' a fortuitous turn of events in London suddenly made the step more practicable.

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In 1995, the BBC, long famed in the Middle East for the Arabic-language broadcasts of its World Service radio network, expanded into television in a deal with a Saudi-backed company, Orbit Communications, which operates several satellite channels of its own. With an annual payment of about $35 million from the Saudis, the BBC provided regular Arabic-language newscasts to be carried on Orbit's main Middle East channel.

After 20 months, the deal foundered when the BBC's insistence on editorial independence ran headlong into Saudi refusal to tolerate BBC reporting on issues seen as impugning Saudi Arabia's ruling family, including executions in the desert kingdom and the activities of a prominent Saudi dissident in Britain. When Orbit pulled the plug on the BBC deal, Qatar hired 20 of the BBC's editors, reporters and technicians, all with Arab backgrounds, as the nucleus of Al Jazeera's team.

The Qatar Government pledged $140 million to finance the channel for five years, but bound Al Jazeera's managers to make the enterprise self-sustaining after that with advertising revenues. Nearly three years later, despite its popular success, the channel has been largely shunned by the big multinational companies that are the major advertisers on the Middle East's tamer satellite channels, almost certainly because the companies fear a backlash from powerful countries like Saudi Arabia.

Despite the reaction of Arab governments, Sheik Hamad, the Qatar ruler, says he intends to stick by Al Jazeera. ''What a headache,'' he said, chuckling, when asked about the satellite channel during an interview at his sumptuous palace in Doha. ''It's caused no end of problems, but all the same I think of it as a kind of oxygen, invigorating our thinking. I tell my children, if you want to know the issues of real importance in the Arab world, watch Al Jazeera.''

Sheik Hamad has taken other steps to liberalize life in Qatar. Earlier this year, Qataris, including women, had their first election, for a municipal council. The next step will be an elected Parliament, with powers yet to be defined.

Although most Qataris applaud the changes, many say the Emir's motives in setting up Al Jazeera and carrying out his reforms have a logic beyond enthusiasm for democracy: the Qatar leader, they say, seized the satellite channel as an effective way to strengthen Qatar's fragile sovereignty and identity, and particularly to give his small gulf nation an image distinct from Saudi Arabia, Qatar's powerful and often hostile neighbor, where the ruling family has shown little appetite for reforms.

''It's been a very intelligent way of telling the world that Qatar exists,'' said Dima Khatib, a 28-year-old reporter at the channel. ''It's put Qatar on the map.''

But the new renown has come at a price, and not only in relations with Saudi Arabia. Last November, Jordan closed Al Jazeera's news bureau in Amman after a Syrian commentator on Al Jazeera, fulminating against Jordan's peace treaty with Israel, described Jordan as ''an artificial entity'' populated by ''a bunch of Bedouins living in an arid desert.''

After apologies from Qatar the order was rescinded. But last month, Kuwait took a leaf from Jordan's book and ordered Al Jazeera's bureau in Kuwait closed after an Islamic militant calling an Al Jazeera phone-in program from Europe suggested that Kuwait's ruler, Sheik Jaber al-Jaber al-Sabah, should be ousted for agreeing to extend the vote in Kuwaiti elections to women. That dispute remains unresolved.

But these spats have paled beside the controversies stirred by Al Jazeera's handling of some of the Muslim world's hottest social and religious issues. On programs with names bursting with irreverent intent -- like ''The Opposite Direction,'' ''More Than One Opinion'' and ''Without Boundaries'' -- the channel has used its studios to foment debates of a candor unimaginable in a public forum in the Arab world before Al Jazeera's arrival.

The most popular show, ''The Opposite Direction,'' uses a format similar to CNN's ''Crossfire,'' with two studio guests chosen for their opposing views confronting each other in the Doha studio, or by live video link. The program has made a star of its presenter, Faisal al-Kasim, a 37-year-old Syrian whose bespectacled appearance and scholarly background -- he holds a doctorate in English literature -- belies a Rottweiler-like snappiness that helps give the show its nervy edge.

One of Mr. Kasim's most talked-about shows featured two women debating polygamy among Muslim men. One participant, a leftist member of the Jordanian Parliament, set the tone for a furious exchange by saying that a practice authorized by the Prophet Mohammed in the seventh century, when many Arab women had been widowed in war, had outlived its validity. ''Why should we put up with this rubbish now?'' she asked.

Her adversary for the show, an Egyptian woman with strongly conservative views on matters of Islamic doctrine, stood up, tore off her microphone and headed for the exit. When a startled Mr. Kasim attempted to dissuade her, noting that the program was ''on air'' across the Arab world, she shot back: ''I don't care if we're on the planet Mars, I'm not going to tolerate this blasphemy.'' With that, she slammed the door behind her, and departed for Cairo.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 4, 1999, on Page 1001001 of the National edition with the headline: Arab TV Gets a New Slant: Newscasts Without Censorship. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe